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Hi Carl,

You just pointed out one of the reasons I don't always like having a .co.uk and a .com. It really does depend on each business. I'll do the pros and cons for you and hope that helps. Both ways will work, it's going to come down to your preferences. And don't go by how many there are, just look for what matters to you.

Pros of One Domain:

• You can geo-target subdirectories (domain.com/uk) and have specific product pages for that content that needs to be different but share the overlapping content like About, Blog, and other material that doesn't change.
• Domain authority condenses and gets stronger overall over time. All of your marketing is to one site rather than two. This is paired with the Pro before are why I'd go down this route if I were you.
• Don't have to rewrite all content like the blogs and articles if they don't need it.
• Expansions to other countries later would rank faster since they would be a part of the main domain rather than a brand new one (ccTLD) every time.

Cons of One Domain:

• Regional differences (personalized vs personalised) cannot be accounted for in all site content. This might not be a problem for your audience though. You'll still need to maintain and write region specific content sometimes, but not as much as the other way.
• Users outside the US or UK could land on either product versions depending on a number of issues. Again, this might not matter to you. You might not want that traffic.
• It'll take some time to get the targeting right, be prepared for the change over and seeing US/UK content ranking over the other sometimes. It happens, but the search engines get it right about 80-90% of the time in the wild.

Pros of Two Domains

• Can target content, all content on the users in that area. Only useful if that is needed.
• ccTLDs are the strongest country specific marker. It is not make or break though.

Cons of Two Domains

• Maintaining two sites, two domain names, two sets of content. Cost and time factors.
• Marketing needs to be done separately for each site.

Let's remove all possible instances in which you might been seen as targeting Ireland. It sounds like the https caused a reclassification of the site.

Second question, did you add the https in Search Console? Do you have both there and both are geo-targeted to the US?

Sorry, one more. When did you add the address for the business at the bottom/footer? Any opposition to removing that and just keeping mailing/location information on a contact page?

Thanks! Clarification, you are geo-targeting this domain in search console to the US? When did you do that? Where is it hosted?

As Mike said, we need to know the site. It sounds like your international targeting is off, but I won't be able to tell how until I can see the site.

Are these issues caused by pagination? Page 1, Page 2, Page 3 things? A canonical is not exactly right. A noindex would be best, (noindex,follow) specifically, just make sure that tag isn't put on page 1. You want page 1 in the index.

I would no suggest disallowing the crawling of the pages (what Andy stated above, sorry Andy, that's a disallow, not a noindex).

I am not sure how to change this for just the paginated pages though. I'd look for a noindex module in the Prestashop Modules area.

The one overall suggestion is to test your new layout for conversion. Content is good, but is not 100% needed in the amount you have on what seems to be ecommerce category pages. Focus on the conversion and having some content.

1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?

No, I've seen categories with less content rank very well. Remember, names of products and other supporting text on the page is content as well. Don't worry about the length.

2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.

Nope. Not unless the user needs it.

3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selection of keywords, for example.
**a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting **information
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I don't want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categories

What you are doing sounds reasonable in theory. Stick with that and keep in mind that you only need to worry about specific terms like navy widgets if there is more than one navy widget and there is a high volume of demand for that. There is a lot that goes into this, but try to keep the category page focused to 1-2 terms.

You have no duplicate problems. The canonicals seem to be in place. I see no URLs like that without a canonical or redirect in my crawl.

Just as a heads up though, when I crawled, I got 107 total pages that would be indexed, does that sound right?

Could you give me your domain? I am not sure if Moz has fixed the canonical issue, but I know it didn't recognize those in the past. I am happy to check your code myself if you can give me the site.

Hahaha. I think you might have one of the few instances that I recommend something I generally don't recommend, which is a hreflang across domains. Now this is going to get complicated, so let me know if I miss something in my explanation.

First, I normally would recommend that the client just use the English translation of the main site if the content won't change at all. But you can't due to the trademarked name.

Second, it sounds like your client never intends on changing the content on the new site for the US audience and doesn't need to. I assume this means that there is no change in products/services and no reason for people to see different content between the France specific English version and this other English version. If there is any change in content, like imagery, messaging, adding, modifying or removing products or services, please let me know. That changes the answer.

If there is no actual changes in content, none at all, and no reason for them, you'll want to use a cross domain hreflang.

France-French bbb.com
France-English bbb.com/en 
English (separate brand) aaa.com

I would use hreflang to show that bbb.com is translated to en-fr at bbb.com/en and en-us at aaa.com.

That's how to deal with that situation, but if their site is a .com and there is some way to just offer their content in English, that will get results faster and be easier to maintain.

With the setup you are considering, you would still need to work on promoting the new domain and that will take time.

I hope this all made sense.

I can't say that I know for sure, but I know how to tell you to make sure.

If they are both listed there, you should have them both as profiles in Search Console. Which one do you use the most and what has the most information on indexation and sitemaps? Use that one.

But I don't think you can go wrong here. It should be the same site. If I were to make an educated guess, go with http://yourdomain.com.

DA is Moz's estimate of the importance of domains in relation to each other. Google does this themselves, so it's not that they "see" DA, but they have something similar.

As long as you don't expect the content from the vendor to bring you organic traffic, you should be okay. You said you have the canonical in place to them, so as long as that is there, there should be no impact from algorithm updates. You wouldn't be penalized for this.

This is highly confounding. I've crawled as Bingbot and nothing is in it's way.

There are a few other issues though. You are using the canonical on a large number of pages. In my crawl, I am seeing the crawler going through a large number of pages and only returning a fraction of them. At this moment my crawler is finding 31k things to crawl, has crawled 1044 and returned only 29 pages that might be indexed. 65% of those are without errors.

It is possible that the site structure is causing issues. I suggest taking time to review your site structure and making it easier for bots to find the pages they need to index, telling them what not to crawl (a canonical is a suggestion and should be used when pages are duplicated), and fixing all errors on the site.

Not seeing anything overtly wrong. I submitted your homepage to Bing for indexing, so we'll see what happens there.

2 other things though.

1. You advertise. Get a hold of the ads side and see if they know anything or if they can connect you with anyone. It's a long shot, but worth a try.
2. Have you verified your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and submitted your sitemap manually?

Can you provide your domain please?

Hi S.

Good issue you have here. I agree with your sentiment below, if you can't maintain separate ccTLDs, they might not be right for you. I am not saying don't do it, as a ccTLD is a strong signal still, but if it doesn't work for you, the structure you mentioned works just fine.

Just to make sure you have the right structure though, can you visit my tool here, answer the questions, and let me know what the result is? It's the best way I have found for determining international site structure.

Once you have that, we can discuss what the right structure is for you.

Kate

They are not great at writing their own explanations for international. What they meant above is if you have geo-targeted correctly, you would not have to use a canonical between two pages that are the same. That they will figure it out on their own.

You aren't geo-targeting, so I still think the canonical would be needed.

Jochen, I can't say I've seen this particular issue, but you are right that it is odd. It sounds like you have everything set up technically correct, but Google WMT is crossing some wires.

I wish I could provide you with more, but I wouldn't know any potential issues without being able to look at your whole setup in GoogleWMT. I recommend having a consultant take a look. Typically, I hate recommending that (because I'm a consultant and that looks shady), but there really is no other way to know if everything is set up right and Google is just on crack, but I think that's it.

HREFLANG is all you need to note the change in language between two pages. However, if the page has not been translated and is available under both language subfolders, make sure there isn't an HREFLANG and has a canonical. When the pages are identical and have 2 URLs, us a canonical and NOT HREFLANG.

I am not sure if Moz detects HREFLANG. If you know it's set up correctly, just ignore the warnings in Moz. And if you can, translate the title and description as well. That'll help get rid of the warnings.

Geo-tagging is not necessary if the content is just translated.